Impinj - SIGNIFICANT DECREASE
IN Engineering time for new product development
CASE STUDY
Next Generation Readers Tested
with CISC RFID Xplorer
CHALLENGE
As per a report submitted by the RAIN RFID Alliance, it is estimated that over 100 retailers and brand owners have currently adopted RAIN RFID technology for inventory management, omnichannel delivery, loss prevention, and enhancing customer experience. At a store level, RAIN RFID helps to improve overall inventory accuracy, replenish items, reduce cycle counts, and place automatic orders at safety stock levels. In recent years, the industry has seen an improvement in tag sensitivity and therefore RAIN RFID applications have become return link limited which means the reader fails to hear the tag answer due to low backscatter range. This is one of the primary reasons for failed deployments. To overcome this challenge and improve the accuracy and read rates of readers, the next generation of readers need to be highly sensitive, phase independent, and insensitive to variation of tag parameters such as Backscatter Link Frequency (BLF) and Miller Number.
Solution
CISC RFID Xplorer, the compact tag and reader performance and conformance tester, is used to evaluate next generation readers developed at Impinj. Impinj is a leading provider of RAIN RFID solutions. Their platform, comprising both hardware and software, uses RAIN RFID to wirelessly connect everyday items to the internet, delivering digital life to the physical world. The Xplorer unit has a fully configurable Tag Emulator that allows the measurement of reader transmit power and reader receive sensitivity through variable backscatter strength as proposed by the RAIN RFID Alliance and ISO standard ISO/IEC 18046-2. The configurability of Xplorer along with its capability of decoding tag and reader communication in real-time has prompted Impinj’s R&D team to use the emulator to evaluate next-generation readers used in retail applications.
“As an all-in-one test instrument, the CISC RFID Xplorer is an efficient and effective choice for testing RAIN RFID readers,” says Max Kingsbury, Lead Technical Marketing Engineer at Impinj. “I recommend the Xplorer to our embedded reader partners as a fast and easy alternative to building their own RF test system.” 
RFID Xplorer allows the testing of readers on different parameters
Testing with RFID Xplorer helps verify that readers meet the functional, performance, design, and implementation requirements identified during deployment at the retail- store. The Xplorer unit is in full accordance with ISO/IEC 18046-2, which addresses the user requirements that allow performance testing of readers in different settings, such as
- Use of tag emulation to allow reader testing beyond the limits of tag production tolerances and the fortune to find such tags
- Use of off-the-shelf readers with default settings
- Evaluation of readers on system parameters as e.g. phase shift or self-jamming
- Evaluation of readers on tag parameters as e.g. BLF variation
RFID Xplorer Sniffer allows debugging in a fraction of seconds
Even after performance verification, RAIN readers may not behave as intended upon interaction with real RAIN tags. RFID Xplorer Sniffer software may then be used to capture the detection and decoding of reader commands and tag responses in real-time. Sniffer allows the user to trigger on-reader commands. Complex waveform signals are recorded and saved on the hard-drive in a stream file to make them available for further analysis both in the time and frequency domains. This includes message parsing, waveform analysis, frequency spectrum, and link timing analysis. The data is stored in a user-friendly format which reduces debugging time to a fraction of seconds.
Results
Impinj achieved
significant decrease in R&D time
- An effective and efficient way of testing
RAIN RFID Readers - Significant decrease in R&D time
- Reader sensitivity tested over different system parameters (phase shift) and tag parameters (BLF)
- Sniffer effectively reduces debugging time
Impinj (NASDAQ: PI) is a leading provider of RAIN RFID solutions. Our platform, comprising both hardware and software, uses RAIN RFID to wirelessly connect
everyday items to the internet, delivering digital life to the physical world. Impinj is helping companies around the world increase sales, improve efficiencies, and deliver compelling experiences.
